THE LONG, FUTILE TALKS AT GENEVA

IN Geneva, the city of celebrated disappointments. U.S., British and Russian negotiators met last week for the 318th time to talk about a treaty banning explosive nuclear tests. No progress was made. For that matter, none had been made during the exasperating 31 months of discussion. And none was likely to be made in the foreseeable future. Said President Kennedy in his television report to the U.S. on his Vienna sessions with Nikita Khrushchev: "No hope emerged with respect to the deadlocked Geneva conference seeking a treaty to ban nuclear tests . . . Our hopes for an end to nuclear tests, for an end to the spread of nuclear weapons, and for some slowing down of the arms race, have been struck a serious blow."

The dismal Geneva situation left it squarely up to President Kennedy to make one of the toughest decisions of his life: whether or not to resume U.S. nuclear testing in lieu of a test-ban agreement. But before any such decision could be made, it was necessary to understand the long and tortured history of the Geneva talks.

"Unrealistic, Impractical." For the past three years, the U.S. has taken the initiative in pressing for a test-ban treaty. In August of 1958, President Eisenhower invited the Soviets to a treaty conference at Geneva to begin that Oct. 31. The U.S.S.R. accepted. The U.S. unilaterally ended its own testing on Oct. 30. The Soviets continued testing for several more weeks, and then, so they claimed, quit.

In Geneva, the U.S. presented plan after plan, each calling for a ban to be enforced by international inspection. The Soviets wanted to halt all tests first, then dicker about inspection. Disgusted by the lack of progress. President Eisenhower said in December of 1959 that the U.S. felt free to resume testing --but would publicly announce any blasts before actually triggering them.

To prevent that, the Soviets made what seemed to be a few concessions. They agreed to sign a treaty banning all easily detectable blasts in the atmosphere, in space, in the sea, and underground tests of more than 19 kilotons--about the size of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. In return for that, they demanded that both sides declare a "voluntary" ban on smaller, underground nuclear explosions, which are virtually undetectable without inspection. Meanwhile, said the Soviets, they would heed a U.S. call to work jointly toward better detection methods. To the U.S., the Soviet carrot looked tasty. Russia seemed to be conceding that some sort of inspection was necessary and that existing blast-detection techniques needed improvement. Thus the U.S. decided to keep talking rather than resume testing.

It has all come to nothing--or maybe worse than nothing. The Soviets have stalled all attempts to improve blast-detection devices. Whenever the U.S. offered a concession on inspection, the U.S.S.R upped the ante. For example, the U.S. had originally held out for a 27-month moratorium on "small blasts," while the Soviets demanded a halt of four or five years; when the U.S. proposed a compromise of three years, the U.S.S.R. decided to insist upon an "indefinite" moratorium. Again, the U.S. originally wanted 20 on-site inspections a year in Russia, while the Soviets would tolerate only three. A couple of weeks ago, when the U.S.'s tough, patient Negotiator Arthur Dean offered a new compromise plan providing for twelve inspections annually on Soviet soil. Russian Delegate Semyon ("Scratchy") Tsarapkin damned the idea as "unrealistic, impractical and not conducive to agreement."

Troika Tripe. By far the biggest stumbling block is the Soviet's demand for a veto. The U.S.S.R. insists that any ban on nuclear tests be policed by a three-headed international commission composed of a Russian, an American and a "neutralist"--any one of whom could veto any action toward inspection. The Soviets call this lovely notion "troika" (see THE WORLD). The West calls it tripe. Says the British delegate at Geneva, Sir Michael Wright: "Troika ends hopes for a nuclear test ban, for controlled disarmament, and--worse still--for any kind of international peace-keeping machinery. This is an act of international sabotage."

There are all too many reasons why Nikita Khrushchev might want the Geneva talks to continue unsuccessfully forever. The U.S. has a much bigger and better variety of nuclear warheads than the Soviets. The Soviets can only close that gap by continuing with secret tests while U.S. tests stand suspended. Central Russia has plenty of underground salt mines where nuclear explosions would make hardly a quiver on a far-off seismograph. And at least one top U.S. official says that the West has lately recorded some "pretty big bangs" inside the U.S.S.R.--although whether they were of nuclear nature remains open to question.

Beyond that, there is the problem of such next-generation weapons as the "neutron" bomb, now a drawing-board idea that testing might bring to reality. Compared with existing nuclear weapons, the neutron bomb would be cheaper and more adaptable to military purposes in the sense that its deadly "bullets" would shower specific areas without long-lasting contamination (TIME, Nov. 30, 1959). The first power to possess the neutron bomb will gain great military superiority. The Soviets, by their own admission, were experimenting with the neutron process as far back as 1952.

The Bladder Technique. Balancing all these factors, John Kennedy decided to talk and not test--for the time being. To Ambassador Dean in Geneva went instructions to continue trying to outsit the Russians (which Dean wryly calls "the bladder technique"). The faint hope was that U.S. patience and the pressure of world opinion might just wring out some Russian concession. "The stakes are too important." said President Kennedy, "for us to abandon the draft treaty we have offered at Geneva."

But patience was wearing thin. U.S. negotiators in Geneva grumbled that the Russians clearly do not believe that the U.S. will resume atomic testing. In private sessions, the Soviets have often chided the U.S. negotiators that "you won't test because you know world opinion is dead set against it."

President Kennedy made clear that his final decision is yet to come. Last week he was seriously considering setting off some test blasts even while continuing to negotiate at Geneva. Said a top U.S. disarmament policymaker: "It hardly seems prudent in the light of present events to risk the security and survival of this country on the good faith of the Soviet Union."

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